Why does my child need chemotherapy?

The main goal of chemo is to kill cancer cells.

My child needs chemotherapy. But what does it do?

The main goal of chemotherapy is to kill cancer cells. Chemo kills cancer cells that form the tumor, and it kills cancer cells that may have traveled away from it. That’s because these drugs go through the bloodstream. Drugs that affect the whole body like this are called systemic treatments.

There are several reasons why your child’s treatment team may use chemo, including:

shrinking a tumor before surgery

killing cancer cells that have spread

improving radiation treatment that will follow chemo

helping a child feel better when cancer can’t be cured

Chemo can shrink a tumor before surgery to make it easier and safer to remove

The role of surgery is to remove the tumor. Sometimes the whole tumor can be taken out, but sometimes it can’t. Or sometimes the tumor is too large to be safely removed.

If any of these cases is true for your child, the pediatric oncologist may suggest chemo. As these drugs kill cancer cells, it makes the tumor smaller. When the tumor is small enough to remove safely, your child will have surgery.

Most often, surgery is the first treatment for solid tumors. So it’s called the primary treatment. When a different treatment is given before the primary treatment, you may hear the treatment team call that first treatment neoadjuvant care. In the case of chemo, this would be called neoadjuvant chemo.